Silicon Valley Redneck

Oh, noes! Another privacy threat!

Latest fearsome news making the rounds: Android malware by name of PlaceRaider, which runs quietly in the background taking pictures at random and transmitting the picture along with location and orientation data!

So, were it to infest my camera, it would get basically three kinds of pictures:

• The inside of my shirt pocket
• My left forefinger
• The shelf where I keep it at night while it charges

If I had a newer model with a front-facing camera, it could transmit even more damaging images:

• An index card
• My left ear
• My face
• The underside of a shelf

And I'll have you know I don't share images of my left ear with just anyone!

Innaresting.

For those of us who never heard of it before (raises hand), Ace introduces us to the McGurk Effect: in understanding speech, visual cues (lip movement, or subtitles) carry more weight than auditory ones (i.e., the actual sound).

This explains the effectiveness of Misheard Song Lyrics videos; the subtitles lead the listener to perceive words he likely never would have thought of just listening to the song.

I suspect it's also related to the disturbing effect of having the audio just a little bit out of sync with the video.

Ripples in the space-time continuum

Just had a call from someone at my broker's office, asking if there was any way they could possibly make my life more and more wonderful.

Meanwhile, I'd postponed (on account of being busy and a bit under the weather) a meeting with my banker to discuss High Finance; he's trying to sell me on a super-duper new service level for which I'd qualify if I moved the contents of my brokerage account to the bank... which might actually be a good idea, being as how the broker's office is in a distant town, while the bank is just down the street, on the way home from Trader Joe's and practically next door to Target.

Will probably have that meeting next week, and make a decision a couple of weeks out after sober reflection.  Also, I worry that I might have to buy a frock coat and a proper silk top hat.

Anyway, as things stand now, when I amble into the bank the employees treat me as if I were wearing the full-on capitalist uniform.  Which, in Silicon Valley, I sort of am: after all, a lot of tech tycoons dress very casually indeed, and if memory serves the State Assemblyman representing upscale Palo Alto bears a remarkable resemblance to a street bum.

As J. Schwartz, New York once remarked: "Now, if I just had some money!"

Curious.

Joy says foreclosures apparently dropped abruptly in the past month.

A good statistic, right?

Also in the past month, the Fed started buying $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities.

Also known as: Attention all banks!  Time to bundle up all your worst mortgages and sell them to the Fed!

Much more profitable than foreclosing on them, no?

And, should the Fed try to foreclose on them... well, the next president will look like a big ol' meanie then, won't he?

Yeah. Right.

The Ministry of Truth just found 4.4 million jobs under the sofa cushion!

Uh-huh.

And I've been looking up old friends and former colleagues, and guess what?  Hardly any of them have regular jobs anymore.  In the past couple of years, a lot of those long-term jobs, with big companies, around Silicon Valley have gone away.

Now, some of these people are still working at their old jobs as consultants or contractors.  (Tells you something about the cost of having employees, hm?)  And the rest?  The occasional "back to school full time at age fortysomething", but mostly "looking for odd jobs the past couple of years".

And one of them was looking at his last week at a job he'd had for about 5 years; the company is withdrawing from California entirely.

Seems to be mighty little hiring going on around here (despite the occasional "hiring boom" headline), and a lot of employee-shedding.

Oh, well.  Opportunity!  The next few months look to be a struggle, but with a bit of marketing (plus, of course, actual work) perhaps I can establish myself as a sort of one-man skunk works, serving those startup companies that can't afford in-house engineering departments... and the big corps that have too much overhead to accomplish little stuff in house.

Another reason to beware of wild rodents

This morning, near the beginning of walkies, I spotted a fuzzy tan object in a parking turnout.

Stepping over the low fence, I got close enough to confirm that it was, indeed, a dead (and uneaten) woodrat.  One of the docents stopped at the same time, and spoke of tossing it in the freezer, on general principles.

Stepping back over the fence to the trail, I clonked my little toe on the top rail.  Five-Fingerses provide little protection against toe-clonkage.  Now I've got a purple toe.

Well, at least it doesn't seem to be broken this time.  Didn't get notably worse as I continued for another 3½ miles or thereabouts, and it's not terribly sensitive.  Just kinda sore, and very purple indeed.

I keep thinking I should install a set of steel toe caps on the old pair of foot gloves.  One cap per toe, of course.  Maybe with claws, like those things Die Fledermaus wears.  (Yeah, probably a bad idea: with the extra leverage, that fence likely would have broken my toe.)

Stop pulling back on the damn stick!

The Ben-Bernank continues printing money, at half a trillion bucks a year until further notice.

The stock market falls.

Gold, fer cryin' out loud, falls.

It ain't workin'!

Thing is: we've been out of airspeed for years.  At this point, we're also out of altitude... or near enough that there's not enough room for recovery.

Anyone bring the parachutes?

In which I attempt to reason like a politician

Headline:

'Psychopaths' Have an Impaired Sense of Smell, Study Suggests

Related story:

Certain Zinc-Based Cold Remedies Linked To Loss Of Sense Of Smell, FDA Says

Ergo:

Snorting zinc may cause psychopathy!

We need to ban zinc in any form which could potentially wind up in someone's nose!

Traditional sunblock, for example!  It's used on the outside of noses, and could all too easily find itself on the inside!

Yes, we must outlaw zinc products now!  Regardless of the cost!

If it saves even one life, it's worth it!

What a strange coïnky-dinky

If, as of this evening, one Googles Winston Smith's ID number... most of the results refer to a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Prevention Act.

Disappointment

Latest Maxim e-mail announced an industrial digital input serializer - this thing.  Neat!  I've been needing something that'll take highish-voltage digital inputs and convert them conveniently to, e.g., SPI at an MCU-friendly voltage!

Can handle 36V on the inputs: good.  Rated -40 to +125C operating: good.  TSSOP: good.  28-lead TSSOP for only 8 channels?  Questionable.  Runs on a 5V supply: WTF?

Er, is this thing really using 5V logic?  Seems like most of today's MCUs don't venture much above 3.3V, and they're trending toward even lower voltages (this LPC1313 I'm playing with today, for example, is spec'ed to run down to 2.0V).

And it seems to have fancy error checking, which implies (I think) that someone's planning to run SPI beyond the board with the MCU on it.  Excuse me, but isn't that what CANbus is supposed to be for?  Like, put of couple of these puppies and maybe some drivers on a board with an LPC11C24 or something?

And... the datasheet is under NDA, so I can't confirm the details just-out-of-curiosity.

Oh, well.  Call me when you've got a plain vanilla SPI (or I²C) input device with low-voltage logic and high-voltage inputs.  Maybe with a threshold-setting pin.